MINNEAPOLIS – When you are as inept as the 2013 Phillies at generating runs, you come up with new and unusual ways of scraping your way to so little production.

Thursday night at Target Field, the Phils ended their five-game losing streak by sweating out a 3-2 win over the Twins.

How much perspiring did it take? A historic amount.

The Phillies had three runs on 16 hits in the game. Only eight other teams since 1916, according to Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index, have had three or fewer runs and 16 or more hits in a nine-inning game. No team in history had had that few runs and many hits in a game while leaving 16 or more runners on base – that is, until the Phils stranded a stupefying 16 runners Thursday night.

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The only other team to meet that anemic criterion of runs and hits and win the game was … the Phillies. The 1954 Phils beat the Pirates, 3-0, in a game where they had 17 hits and 13 runners left on base.

The Phils had to rally for two runs in the top of the eighth to avoid an embarrassing loss, as consecutive hits by Kevin Frandsen double), Ben Revere (single) and Michael Young (single), followed by an RBI fielder’s choice by Jimmy Rollins pressed two runs across, before that whole “big inning” aspiration was blown up by a Delmon Young double play.

Cliff Lee (8-2) had to endure a great deal of long innings of stranded runners on the bench, while mowing through the Twins with ease for the first six innings. The Phils had spotted him a run in the first when Revere singled for the first of his season-high four hits and scored on a Ryan Howard single to right through a Twins infield that curiously doesn’t put the heavy shift on for him.

After that, it was long, agonizing, fruitless frames for the Phils, and quick ineptitude for the Twins against Lee. He didn’t give up a hit until the fourth and carried a one-hitter into the bottom of the seventh.

That’s when it seemed the Phils might be going off the rails to their sixth straight loss. A Joe Mauer walk was followed by a roller to third off the bat of Ryan Doumit on which he was called safe. Replays showed umpire Gary Darling got it wrong, and Lee fumed afterward.

It got worse when Justin Morneau lined a two-run, two-out double to left-center that fell just out of the diving effort by Revere.

It felt like doomsday, yet the Phillies figured out a way to atone for their offensive sins in the most minimal of ways. That passed the baton to Mike Adams, who worked a perfect eighth, then Jonathan Papelbon, who notched his 11th save.

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